London's best gin bars

Gin palaces in London

Scene from a London gin palace

Londoners are drinking gin like it's going out of fashion. Which
it did for a bit, around the 1980s. But now it's back with a
vengeance. The spirit has a long history, much of it disreputable,
and new cocktail bars are having fun rummaging in the vintage
dressing-up box, finding design inspiration from New York
speakeasies, Parisian jazz bars and, increasingly, the sort of
low-lit Victorian drinking establishment where you might have
rubbed velvet-clad shoulders with Whistler or Wilde.

The original gin palaces offered passers-by a quick fix of the
drink in flamboyant surroundings. They were early adopters of new
technology such as plate-glass and gas lighting, and according to
Alex Werner of the Museum of London, 'there was nothing else like
them at the time. With their huge windows and gas lighting, they
would have been the big new thing of their era - ­a little like the
Apple Store on Regent Street today. All classes would have gone,
apart from the higher echelons; although they probably attracted a
few adventurous gentlemen in search of a lady.'

In Sketches by Boz, Charles Dickens describes one near Tottenham
Court Road. 'All is light and brilliancy,' he wrote, 'the
plate-glass windows surrounded by stucco rosettes, and its
profusion of gas-lights in richly-gilt burners, is perfectly
dazzling. Behind the counter are two showily-dressed damsels with
large necklaces assisted by the ostensible proprietor of the
concern, a stout, coarse fellow in a fur cap, put on very much on
one side to give him a knowing air, and to display his sandy
whiskers to the best advantage.'

Sadly, while there are still plenty of stout, coarse fellows,
there aren't any surviving examples of Victorian gin palaces in
London. But you can see their architectural style - the mirrors,
the ornate mouldings, the long serving counter - ­in
late-19th-century pubs such as the Princess Louise in Holborn and
the Viaduct
Tavern in Smithfield.